A phone with a web browser IS the definition of "smartphone".
Nope. The term has no precise definition, but smart phones were around for years before the first primitive mobile browsers appeared.
The iPhone has a PDA form factor. It does all those PDA functions you discuss.
Yeah, but how many iPhone buyers care how well it does them? The only PDA feature most iPhone users care about is maintaining a contact list, which has been a basic feature of cell phones since the nineties. If you want to define "PDA feature" expansively, you could add email to that list, but I wouldn't. (We're getting into hair-splitting territory here, but I first saw a PDA in the 1980s, so email hardly seems like a "PDA feature" to me. All mobile devices, like all software applications, inevitably grow until they can read mail.)
The form factor is not a meaningful coincidence. If Apple had stuck with media players and stayed out of the cell phone/mobile internet device market, it's likely they would have released a non-wifi iPod Touch with the same form factor.
By "smart phone" I mean a phone designed to handle grocery lists, business tasks, third-party applications, business cards, PIM applications, basically generic PDA stuff. That's what set the first "smart phones" apart from non-smart phones; they were basically just PDAs with a cell phone function. The most important (and best) applications in the iPhone are the media player and the web browser. Those features may be expected in modern smart phones, but they certainly aren't defining features.
It's the puritanical mindset of Americans that pushes these normal behaviors into the shadows and away from the help that the victims so desperately need.
I'm pretty sure it isn't the puritanical mindset of Americans. It's more that drug users and prostitutes feel embarrassed and humiliated that everyone, including you, considers them "victims" who "desperately need" help. There's nothing to be done about that -- they are in a pathetic state, and they know it. Pretending they're doing okay with their "lifestyle choice" wouldn't help, even if we could do it with a straight face. So go ahead and help those people, and I'll continue to vote for my tax dollars to support the effort, but don't think they're going to feel good about basking in your pity. They feel just as ashamed under your gaze as under that of a "puritanical American."
I actually just ordered an iPhone (too lazy to keep calling around when the first four places I called were out of stock) despite the fashion accessory angle, not because of it. I am a typical socially lame Slashdotter who has the same haircut he had fifteen years ago, and I'm worried that I'm going to look like a deluded retard with an iPhone in my hand. "IIIIIIIAM KOOL MY MOM TOLD ME SOOOOOAAAAAHHH AND AAAIH HAVE iPHOOOOOONE"
There's not a "creative" bone in my body. I still freak out when I talk to girls, and it's not because I'm afraid of being outed as a heterosexual or having my styling secrets stolen. I love my boxy black ThinkPad but have a plasticky Dell at home 'cuz it was cheaper. I'm afraid to wear t-shirts with designs on them, because that would be too bold for me. Too much of a risk.
I had boxy glasses frames when thin ones were in, and I have thin frames now that thick plastic ones are cool. That's not because I'm iconoclastic or countercyclical. It's because it takes me that long to summon up the courage to follow the crowd.
Yes, to me, having an iPhone seems like a foolish boast, a pretense I can't back up, like telling everyone at school that I know karate and can kill with my hands. Someone's going to call me on it, and it will result in my humiliation. I am Not Cool Enough for an iPhone. I'm pretty sure Apple stock will drop when I'm seen on the streets with it.
But I'm getting an iPhone because I just can't deny its superiority. It would be an injustice to spend my money on something else. Credit where credit is due, and goddammit I'm tired of putting up with crappy phones when something like the iPhone is available.
that had the same features as a comparable $150 phone from any other manufacturer
A feature list does not a product make. If (like me) you were keeping an eye out for a decent, featureful phone in the years before the iPhone came out, then you probably noticed a few phones with incredible feature lists that major phone companies developed but never sold in major markets. Despite the phones' impressive feature lists, they weren't good enough to carry the company logo in a major market like Japan, Korea, or the US. The ones they did sell in the US were just barely usable enough for buyers who craved those features and were willing to put up with a lot of clunkiness, so you can imagine how bad the phones were that they only sold in China.
So then the iPhone came out, and I was like, "Yay, now someone has figured out how to make a feature-filled phone with a decent interface that isn't the size of my fist. Any day now some non-evil carrier will have one. Yay! I can't wait." And I waited for a frickin' year while the cell phone companies continued to come out with crap. I was counting on them to AT LEAST clone the iPhone and come out with a "good-enough" copy of it, maybe a year behind and slightly less stylish, but what does that matter to a hopeless dork like me anyway.
Well, they did take the iPhone seriously. They ran around saying "iPhone competitor" and "iPhone killer" so often it sounded like a religious mantra. But if you judged by the phones they released, it was like they had never seen an iPhone before. They kept making awkward stylus-based smart phones and cooked up a few pathetic "iPhone competitors" like the LG Venus. It became clear that not only were the cell phone makers not going to match the iPhone in 2008, they aren't even on pace to match the original iPhone for years. Certainly not in 2009, unless an Android-based product turns out to have an Apple-like (i.e., highly polished right off the bat) debut.
So today, this very minute actually, I'm walking out the door to buy an iPhone. (How many times I've posted something on Slashdot in defense of the iPhone and wished I could say that! Um, well, two or three times at least.)
I'll sell my soul to AT&T, despite their shameful cooperation with the un-American acts of my embarrassingly un-American American government, because the gap between the iPhone and second-best is just too embarrassingly large. I won't put up with it anymore.
And as usual I'll add my caveat that I'm not interested in a Blackberry, "smart phone," or PDA, so I'm not claiming the iPhone is the clear leader, or even the best product, in those markets.
Re:Establishing de facto (open source) standard ?
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I'm tempted to disagree with you, but given your qualifications (and my lack thereof) perhaps I'd better phrase it as a question. If we're just talking about a browser language for the next five to ten years, won't static code be much faster than dynamic code for most if not all of that time? It took Sun years to make Java fast, and it seems like optimizing Javascript would require much more sophisticated techniques that would take even longer to reach users. I'd be very happy to hear I'm wrong, though, because it would make this news much less depressing.
Re:Establishing de facto (open source) standard ?
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I think their primary roles would have been for basic libraries, for generated code such as SOAP bindings, and other code that ordinary web-developers would not write. They would work quite well for that and allow better robustness and possibly better performance (less dynamism -> more JIT compiler optimizations) for core functionality like parsing XML and drawing graphics.
The only way I can imagine that those features are "unsound for the Web" is that ordinary web developers would not bother to understand and use them.
Unfortunately, many of the people who write Javascript these days stubbornly identify themselves as non-programmers. They resist learning anything that smacks of a "real" programming language. There could have been an ugly struggle between people trying to force these features on web developers and web developers clinging to Javascript's current free-form dynamism. On the face of it, it might seem that web developers are just lazy to avoid learning a few new language features. It also sounds quite silly for them to say, "I'm a programming idiot; I can't write code," despite slinging around complicated DHTML, CSS, and Javascript. They're obviously intellectually capable of learning and using a "real" programming language for "real" programming.
I think their basic point is sound, though. The job of writing the Javascript for web pages often falls to the web designers, and they should be allowed to program in a simple and dynamic language that suits their artistic temperaments and lets them focus their minds on their creative specialties. They do have artistic design responsibilities that programmers do not, after all, so it doesn't make sense for them to invest as much time in learning about programming as programmers do.
I don't think any nerds interested in losing their virginity would subject themselves to the indignity of the Nerdlympics. Instead, they would compete in the Apple "Relevant Hipster Creators of Tomorrow's Pop Culture"-lympics, which consist of blogging, tweeting, and moodily tossing one's floppy hair out of one's eyes.
Yeah, kids these days have no idea what real C code looks like. C code that looks like C is not industrial-grade C. To know what real, portable, robust production C looks like, copy some textbook C code into a text editor, add a few randomly chosen non-C keywords in front of every struct and function declaration, and then upcase everything except the function names where they are defined and all the variable names. Now imagine everything in uppercase is a macro whose default value is declared in a bunch of nested #ifdefs in a default header file, but whose correct value you must set in your makefile according to the target platform, the compiler, and how you use the code.
THAT is real C code. Larry Wall invented Perl because he knew the ancient ways of Real C Programmers were dying out, and he wanted to preserve a pale reflection of their greatness, like Britney Spears covering Aretha Franklin.
Clearly usability is applicable to all users of technology. I am not claiming to the contrary, I don't know where you got that impression.
I got it from your statement that the poster's comfort with command-line tools "disqualifies [him] from making any useful observations about usability in general." Really, how do you justify this? You can't discount his opinion merely because his skills and needs are unusual -- by that standard, we would also disqualify people with visual or motor skills impairments. Not that command line skill is a disability;-)
Everybody is qualified to talk about usability from their own perspective. You wouldn't adopt the OP as your Model Target User if you were developing a media player for Linux newbies, but that doesn't invalidate his point and it certainly doesn't disqualify him from talking about usability.
Sure, but that still does not excuse the incorrect assumption that "if it works for me, it will work for others like me".
That is an overgeneralization of what the OP said. He said that usability means something different to him than it means to some other users, which is true. He didn't say that other command-line users have the same usability requirements he does. However, I would say (even though he didn't) that command-line users tend to have some things in common, such as the fact that...
This is very much not the case, especially for UNIX hackers, who most free software developers tend to be tend to be and who tend have very, very custom workflows (due to the encouragement given to configure their environment using shell tricks and scripts)
... most UNIX hackers appreciate the ability to control an application from a shell script! Thanks for coming up with that example for me;-)
By the way, I wasn't trolling about GNOME. Focusing on one user population tends to hurt other populations with different needs. I think it's great that GNOME is catering to a user population that is generally underserved on Unix platforms, but it seems quite apparent from numerous and bitter complaints on Slashdot and elsewhere that GNOME has alienated a subset of its former users. Once again, I think there's nothing wrong with that. It's better than having all the desktop and/or window manager projects chasing the same population of power users.
"I find working from a command line to be the most efficient way to get things done"
Which puts you in a very small minority, and disqualifies you from making any useful observations about usability in general.
This is the kind of attitude that alienates programmers from any concerns about usability: the idea that usability is only for the masses, and making programs more usable is all about making them more suitable for the least computer-savvy demographic imaginable.
Since most open-source hackers start by producing development tools for themselves and their colleagues, it is quite appropriate for them to concentrate on users who are like themselves. After all, the developer of any application, even a development tool aimed at other geeks, must first grapple with the mental gap between himself and a user (however sophisticated) who has no prior knowledge of the application. That is not so different from imagining the difference between a sophisticated user and an unsophisticated one.
If you belittle that kind of work, then how do you expect programmers to learn the basics of usability? Usability applies to every application and every user, not just GUI programs and casual users. If you want the Linux desktop to be usable by casual computer users, then you should encourage all developers to cultivate their usability skills, even those who develop command-line tools for fellow geeks. Some of those developers will move on to creating GUI applications for the general population. If you encourage them to ignore the usability requirements of their users because power users are "disqualified" from the concept of usability, they will just develop a bad habit of ignoring users.
Finally, it makes perfect sense for Linux geeks to worry that "usability" (in the sense of an exclusive focus on the least savvy users) will make their systems less usable. It has already happened with GNOME, which has alienated many of its former fans to cater to the general user population. All things considered, I think it's good that one major Linux desktop has chosen that route, but it proves that power users are short-changed by the assumption that usability applies only to unsophisticated users.
Not strictly true. New runners should make sure you have a good pair of running shoes and for busty women, a sufficiently sturdy sports bra. Otherwise they're in for a world of hurt.
Or you could do judo, where falling down and getting up are the little rest breaks you savor between the frantic, exhausting attempts NOT to fall down:-)
I love my weight vest. I use it to add twenty to thirty pounds (doesn't sound like much, does it?) for pushups, pullups, burpees, kettlebell work, lunges, etc. I love it for two reasons:
First, it gives me more variety for pushups and an occasional insane challenge for pullups.
Second, my shoulders and wrists are always the first link to give out when I'm doing kettlebells, and my lower body and core are more important for performance in my sport of choice, soccer. The weight vest lets me work my core, hips, and legs beyond the limits of my wussy upper body.
Replying to myself to add a P.S.: Competitive judo (or maybe jiu-jitsu; I haven't tried it) might be more to your liking than karate. These days, judo is usually seen and taught as a sport (though it can also be practiced as a martial art.) As a sport, it has goals and rules that have nothing to do with hurting your opponent.
With the exception of submitting your opponent (in which you are much more limited, technique-wise, than in MMA) pain and physical damage don't enter the competitive equation at all. You're actually more likely to get hurt when your opponent botches a throw (for zero or fractional points) than when your opponent throws you perfectly (for a full point, winning the match.)
In contrast, it's hard to award points for punching someone without trying to distinguish between a worthless ticky-tack punch and a solid connection, so striking martial arts, even when practiced as sport, are still in some sense oriented around the concept of hurting your opponent. If that's what bothered you about karate, judo is a wonderful alternative AND a hellacious workout.
Knowing that Aikido isn't into sparring and competitions brings me one step closer to joining.
If you don't like competitive martial arts, you should consider doing something else that involves competition. We have deeply rooted instincts that hold us back when nothing is on the line. I know people who do all kinds of exercise (running, cycling, lifting weights) who talk about how their sport allows them to "compete against themselves" and "live up to their true potential" and "channel their inner drive" and blah blah blah, but when you talk them into a game of Ultimate Frisbee, they end up exerting themselves harder than they have since they were teenagers and having an epic "Holy crap I didn't realize I was holding back" revelation. Then two weeks later they're back to coasting along in their mellow "I'm competing against myself" pseudo-exertion. The only people I know who manage to go all-out at solitary sports like running are the ones who always know when their next race is.
So give competition a chance! "Mellow" is not an effective mode of exercise. The pain of losing is a small price to pay for discovering new levels of effort and performance.
No prob, and sorry for coming off a bit shrill. Java really has delivered on the write-once, run-anywhere promise, and it shouldn't be lightly mocked, because it would be nice to see the same standard applied to other projects. Yet there is a persistent meme that write-once, run-anywhere must be impossible -- because even Java failed to deliver it. Other than code with dependencies on external native libraries, Java is amazingly consistent. In fact, in my experience, it has been perfectly so.
Java's reputation has been hurt in the past by Java libraries that depend on external native libraries. AWT was a mistake, and in the early days a lot of popular Java libraries were wrappers around native libraries. In many cases this was unnecessary -- there were lots of people who preferred those libraries over pure Java libraries. They got a performance gain but ended up with debugging nightmares. Why were they using Java in the first place if they believed it was inferior to native code? Often they were forced to use Java because of dot-com fads.
This is how it went down: Person J loved Java and forced Person C to use it.
Person J: Use Java; I command it. It works the same everywhere. Person C: That doesn't make any sense. I don't believe it. There will be platform differences. Person J: Use Java. There will be no differences. I command it. Person C: But Java sucks.... Person J: Use Java. I command it! Person C (to himself): Well, I can limit the company's exposure to this Java suckiness by using libraries that are wrappers for native code. - later - Person J: Our Java code has pernicious, mysterious bugs that only show up in deployment! Inconceivable! Oh darling customers, please don't run away so fast! Person C: See, I told you so (under his breath:) dumbshit.
Person C (three zillion times in bars, newsgroups, and public restrooms): Java never really was write-once, run-anywhere. Gather round and hear the story of how a buggy XML parser destroyed thirty million dollars of venture capital.
Part of it is also a lot of people (myself included) got extremely sick of the "guess what I'm thinking" style of puzzle.
I think some game makers got confused between puzzles, where you get satisfaction from figuring out the solution, and jokes, where the player's confusion is a setup for the punch line.
It's usually impossible to predict the punch line to a good joke, but a joke is only funny if the game tells you the punch line instead of stonewalling you until you randomly guess it. The Leisure Suit Larry games had a way of confusing you for a little while and then "delivering" the punch line without making you work unreasonably hard for it. The Larry games also took care to get the delivery right in terms of gameplay, dialog, and animation. They milked a hell of a lot out of a handful of dirty jokes -- it seemed like everyone enjoyed the first two or three Larry games they played.
C:\Documents and Settings\admin>"c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_07\bin\appletvie wer.exe" http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/ Warning: Can't read AppletViewer properties file: C:\Documents and Settings\admi n\.hotjava\properties Using defaults. Warning: tag requires name attribute. Warning: tag requires name attribute. java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 288
at d.a(Unknown Source)
at d.a(Unknown Source)
at dust.a(Unknown Source)
at dust.init(Unknown Source)
at sun.applet.AppletPanel.run(AppletPanel.java:425)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)
How's that for write-once, run-anywhere? Not even Java can give you the same behavior on different platforms when you invoke different programs or provide different input. The web page doesn't validate and may even be miscoded (though I couldn't figure that out for sure.) The browser must clean up the page before passing data to the applet plugin.
Do you see now why I stick my neck out for Java, even to the point of downloading the entire frickin' JDK and installing it on a five-year-old Celeron laptop, just so I could reproduce the same behavior under Windows? Don't think I would have done that if I wasn't sure I would get some satisfaction from it:-)
The old-style puzzles might or might not integrate well into current styles of games, but they deserve to be treated as their own genre. The old games are terribly stale -- the humor and visuals just don't stack up for kids who have grown up on Photoshop contests and TV shows with sophisticated writing (Seinfeld, the Sopranos, etc.) Standards have been raised.
I think computer games would still be a great medium for funny writing and amusing visuals. The real problem is, who's going to do the creative work? Given how poorly the classics have aged, I doubt any aspiring game creators are excited about reviving the genre.
Slashdot Mirror
That downmod was an au jus dis.
Nope. The term has no precise definition, but smart phones were around for years before the first primitive mobile browsers appeared.
Yeah, but how many iPhone buyers care how well it does them? The only PDA feature most iPhone users care about is maintaining a contact list, which has been a basic feature of cell phones since the nineties. If you want to define "PDA feature" expansively, you could add email to that list, but I wouldn't. (We're getting into hair-splitting territory here, but I first saw a PDA in the 1980s, so email hardly seems like a "PDA feature" to me. All mobile devices, like all software applications, inevitably grow until they can read mail.)
The form factor is not a meaningful coincidence. If Apple had stuck with media players and stayed out of the cell phone/mobile internet device market, it's likely they would have released a non-wifi iPod Touch with the same form factor.
By "smart phone" I mean a phone designed to handle grocery lists, business tasks, third-party applications, business cards, PIM applications, basically generic PDA stuff. That's what set the first "smart phones" apart from non-smart phones; they were basically just PDAs with a cell phone function. The most important (and best) applications in the iPhone are the media player and the web browser. Those features may be expected in modern smart phones, but they certainly aren't defining features.
P.S. As per common usage, by "drugs" I mean "the ones that mess you up and ruin your life."
I'm pretty sure it isn't the puritanical mindset of Americans. It's more that drug users and prostitutes feel embarrassed and humiliated that everyone, including you, considers them "victims" who "desperately need" help. There's nothing to be done about that -- they are in a pathetic state, and they know it. Pretending they're doing okay with their "lifestyle choice" wouldn't help, even if we could do it with a straight face. So go ahead and help those people, and I'll continue to vote for my tax dollars to support the effort, but don't think they're going to feel good about basking in your pity. They feel just as ashamed under your gaze as under that of a "puritanical American."
I actually just ordered an iPhone (too lazy to keep calling around when the first four places I called were out of stock) despite the fashion accessory angle, not because of it. I am a typical socially lame Slashdotter who has the same haircut he had fifteen years ago, and I'm worried that I'm going to look like a deluded retard with an iPhone in my hand. "IIIIIIIAM KOOL MY MOM TOLD ME SOOOOOAAAAAHHH AND AAAIH HAVE iPHOOOOOONE"
There's not a "creative" bone in my body. I still freak out when I talk to girls, and it's not because I'm afraid of being outed as a heterosexual or having my styling secrets stolen. I love my boxy black ThinkPad but have a plasticky Dell at home 'cuz it was cheaper. I'm afraid to wear t-shirts with designs on them, because that would be too bold for me. Too much of a risk.
I had boxy glasses frames when thin ones were in, and I have thin frames now that thick plastic ones are cool. That's not because I'm iconoclastic or countercyclical. It's because it takes me that long to summon up the courage to follow the crowd.
Yes, to me, having an iPhone seems like a foolish boast, a pretense I can't back up, like telling everyone at school that I know karate and can kill with my hands. Someone's going to call me on it, and it will result in my humiliation. I am Not Cool Enough for an iPhone. I'm pretty sure Apple stock will drop when I'm seen on the streets with it.
But I'm getting an iPhone because I just can't deny its superiority. It would be an injustice to spend my money on something else. Credit where credit is due, and goddammit I'm tired of putting up with crappy phones when something like the iPhone is available.
A feature list does not a product make. If (like me) you were keeping an eye out for a decent, featureful phone in the years before the iPhone came out, then you probably noticed a few phones with incredible feature lists that major phone companies developed but never sold in major markets. Despite the phones' impressive feature lists, they weren't good enough to carry the company logo in a major market like Japan, Korea, or the US. The ones they did sell in the US were just barely usable enough for buyers who craved those features and were willing to put up with a lot of clunkiness, so you can imagine how bad the phones were that they only sold in China.
So then the iPhone came out, and I was like, "Yay, now someone has figured out how to make a feature-filled phone with a decent interface that isn't the size of my fist. Any day now some non-evil carrier will have one. Yay! I can't wait." And I waited for a frickin' year while the cell phone companies continued to come out with crap. I was counting on them to AT LEAST clone the iPhone and come out with a "good-enough" copy of it, maybe a year behind and slightly less stylish, but what does that matter to a hopeless dork like me anyway.
Well, they did take the iPhone seriously. They ran around saying "iPhone competitor" and "iPhone killer" so often it sounded like a religious mantra. But if you judged by the phones they released, it was like they had never seen an iPhone before. They kept making awkward stylus-based smart phones and cooked up a few pathetic "iPhone competitors" like the LG Venus. It became clear that not only were the cell phone makers not going to match the iPhone in 2008, they aren't even on pace to match the original iPhone for years. Certainly not in 2009, unless an Android-based product turns out to have an Apple-like (i.e., highly polished right off the bat) debut.
So today, this very minute actually, I'm walking out the door to buy an iPhone. (How many times I've posted something on Slashdot in defense of the iPhone and wished I could say that! Um, well, two or three times at least.)
I'll sell my soul to AT&T, despite their shameful cooperation with the un-American acts of my embarrassingly un-American American government, because the gap between the iPhone and second-best is just too embarrassingly large. I won't put up with it anymore.
And as usual I'll add my caveat that I'm not interested in a Blackberry, "smart phone," or PDA, so I'm not claiming the iPhone is the clear leader, or even the best product, in those markets.
I'm tempted to disagree with you, but given your qualifications (and my lack thereof) perhaps I'd better phrase it as a question. If we're just talking about a browser language for the next five to ten years, won't static code be much faster than dynamic code for most if not all of that time? It took Sun years to make Java fast, and it seems like optimizing Javascript would require much more sophisticated techniques that would take even longer to reach users. I'd be very happy to hear I'm wrong, though, because it would make this news much less depressing.
I think their primary roles would have been for basic libraries, for generated code such as SOAP bindings, and other code that ordinary web-developers would not write. They would work quite well for that and allow better robustness and possibly better performance (less dynamism -> more JIT compiler optimizations) for core functionality like parsing XML and drawing graphics.
The only way I can imagine that those features are "unsound for the Web" is that ordinary web developers would not bother to understand and use them.
Unfortunately, many of the people who write Javascript these days stubbornly identify themselves as non-programmers. They resist learning anything that smacks of a "real" programming language. There could have been an ugly struggle between people trying to force these features on web developers and web developers clinging to Javascript's current free-form dynamism. On the face of it, it might seem that web developers are just lazy to avoid learning a few new language features. It also sounds quite silly for them to say, "I'm a programming idiot; I can't write code," despite slinging around complicated DHTML, CSS, and Javascript. They're obviously intellectually capable of learning and using a "real" programming language for "real" programming.
I think their basic point is sound, though. The job of writing the Javascript for web pages often falls to the web designers, and they should be allowed to program in a simple and dynamic language that suits their artistic temperaments and lets them focus their minds on their creative specialties. They do have artistic design responsibilities that programmers do not, after all, so it doesn't make sense for them to invest as much time in learning about programming as programmers do.
I don't think any nerds interested in losing their virginity would subject themselves to the indignity of the Nerdlympics. Instead, they would compete in the Apple "Relevant Hipster Creators of Tomorrow's Pop Culture"-lympics, which consist of blogging, tweeting, and moodily tossing one's floppy hair out of one's eyes.
Yeah, kids these days have no idea what real C code looks like. C code that looks like C is not industrial-grade C. To know what real, portable, robust production C looks like, copy some textbook C code into a text editor, add a few randomly chosen non-C keywords in front of every struct and function declaration, and then upcase everything except the function names where they are defined and all the variable names. Now imagine everything in uppercase is a macro whose default value is declared in a bunch of nested #ifdefs in a default header file, but whose correct value you must set in your makefile according to the target platform, the compiler, and how you use the code.
THAT is real C code. Larry Wall invented Perl because he knew the ancient ways of Real C Programmers were dying out, and he wanted to preserve a pale reflection of their greatness, like Britney Spears covering Aretha Franklin.
Clearly usability is applicable to all users of technology. I am not claiming to the contrary, I don't know where you got that impression.
I got it from your statement that the poster's comfort with command-line tools "disqualifies [him] from making any useful observations about usability in general." Really, how do you justify this? You can't discount his opinion merely because his skills and needs are unusual -- by that standard, we would also disqualify people with visual or motor skills impairments. Not that command line skill is a disability ;-)
Everybody is qualified to talk about usability from their own perspective. You wouldn't adopt the OP as your Model Target User if you were developing a media player for Linux newbies, but that doesn't invalidate his point and it certainly doesn't disqualify him from talking about usability.
Sure, but that still does not excuse the incorrect assumption that "if it works for me, it will work for others like me".
That is an overgeneralization of what the OP said. He said that usability means something different to him than it means to some other users, which is true. He didn't say that other command-line users have the same usability requirements he does. However, I would say (even though he didn't) that command-line users tend to have some things in common, such as the fact that...
This is very much not the case, especially for UNIX hackers, who most free software developers tend to be tend to be and who tend have very, very custom workflows (due to the encouragement given to configure their environment using shell tricks and scripts)
... most UNIX hackers appreciate the ability to control an application from a shell script! Thanks for coming up with that example for me ;-)
By the way, I wasn't trolling about GNOME. Focusing on one user population tends to hurt other populations with different needs. I think it's great that GNOME is catering to a user population that is generally underserved on Unix platforms, but it seems quite apparent from numerous and bitter complaints on Slashdot and elsewhere that GNOME has alienated a subset of its former users. Once again, I think there's nothing wrong with that. It's better than having all the desktop and/or window manager projects chasing the same population of power users.
"I find working from a command line to be the most efficient way to get things done"
Which puts you in a very small minority, and disqualifies you from making any useful observations about usability in general.
This is the kind of attitude that alienates programmers from any concerns about usability: the idea that usability is only for the masses, and making programs more usable is all about making them more suitable for the least computer-savvy demographic imaginable.
Since most open-source hackers start by producing development tools for themselves and their colleagues, it is quite appropriate for them to concentrate on users who are like themselves. After all, the developer of any application, even a development tool aimed at other geeks, must first grapple with the mental gap between himself and a user (however sophisticated) who has no prior knowledge of the application. That is not so different from imagining the difference between a sophisticated user and an unsophisticated one.
If you belittle that kind of work, then how do you expect programmers to learn the basics of usability? Usability applies to every application and every user, not just GUI programs and casual users. If you want the Linux desktop to be usable by casual computer users, then you should encourage all developers to cultivate their usability skills, even those who develop command-line tools for fellow geeks. Some of those developers will move on to creating GUI applications for the general population. If you encourage them to ignore the usability requirements of their users because power users are "disqualified" from the concept of usability, they will just develop a bad habit of ignoring users.
Finally, it makes perfect sense for Linux geeks to worry that "usability" (in the sense of an exclusive focus on the least savvy users) will make their systems less usable. It has already happened with GNOME, which has alienated many of its former fans to cater to the general user population. All things considered, I think it's good that one major Linux desktop has chosen that route, but it proves that power users are short-changed by the assumption that usability applies only to unsophisticated users.
I second everything, especially Stumptuous. Mod this AC up!
No equipment needed.
Not strictly true. New runners should make sure you have a good pair of running shoes and for busty women, a sufficiently sturdy sports bra. Otherwise they're in for a world of hurt.
Or you could do judo, where falling down and getting up are the little rest breaks you savor between the frantic, exhausting attempts NOT to fall down :-)
I love my weight vest. I use it to add twenty to thirty pounds (doesn't sound like much, does it?) for pushups, pullups, burpees, kettlebell work, lunges, etc. I love it for two reasons:
First, it gives me more variety for pushups and an occasional insane challenge for pullups.
Second, my shoulders and wrists are always the first link to give out when I'm doing kettlebells, and my lower body and core are more important for performance in my sport of choice, soccer. The weight vest lets me work my core, hips, and legs beyond the limits of my wussy upper body.
Replying to myself to add a P.S.: Competitive judo (or maybe jiu-jitsu; I haven't tried it) might be more to your liking than karate. These days, judo is usually seen and taught as a sport (though it can also be practiced as a martial art.) As a sport, it has goals and rules that have nothing to do with hurting your opponent.
With the exception of submitting your opponent (in which you are much more limited, technique-wise, than in MMA) pain and physical damage don't enter the competitive equation at all. You're actually more likely to get hurt when your opponent botches a throw (for zero or fractional points) than when your opponent throws you perfectly (for a full point, winning the match.)
In contrast, it's hard to award points for punching someone without trying to distinguish between a worthless ticky-tack punch and a solid connection, so striking martial arts, even when practiced as sport, are still in some sense oriented around the concept of hurting your opponent. If that's what bothered you about karate, judo is a wonderful alternative AND a hellacious workout.
P.P.S. Don't be such a chauvinist pig :-)
Knowing that Aikido isn't into sparring and competitions brings me one step closer to joining.
If you don't like competitive martial arts, you should consider doing something else that involves competition. We have deeply rooted instincts that hold us back when nothing is on the line. I know people who do all kinds of exercise (running, cycling, lifting weights) who talk about how their sport allows them to "compete against themselves" and "live up to their true potential" and "channel their inner drive" and blah blah blah, but when you talk them into a game of Ultimate Frisbee, they end up exerting themselves harder than they have since they were teenagers and having an epic "Holy crap I didn't realize I was holding back" revelation. Then two weeks later they're back to coasting along in their mellow "I'm competing against myself" pseudo-exertion. The only people I know who manage to go all-out at solitary sports like running are the ones who always know when their next race is.
So give competition a chance! "Mellow" is not an effective mode of exercise. The pain of losing is a small price to pay for discovering new levels of effort and performance.
No prob, and sorry for coming off a bit shrill. Java really has delivered on the write-once, run-anywhere promise, and it shouldn't be lightly mocked, because it would be nice to see the same standard applied to other projects. Yet there is a persistent meme that write-once, run-anywhere must be impossible -- because even Java failed to deliver it. Other than code with dependencies on external native libraries, Java is amazingly consistent. In fact, in my experience, it has been perfectly so.
Java's reputation has been hurt in the past by Java libraries that depend on external native libraries. AWT was a mistake, and in the early days a lot of popular Java libraries were wrappers around native libraries. In many cases this was unnecessary -- there were lots of people who preferred those libraries over pure Java libraries. They got a performance gain but ended up with debugging nightmares. Why were they using Java in the first place if they believed it was inferior to native code? Often they were forced to use Java because of dot-com fads.
This is how it went down: Person J loved Java and forced Person C to use it.
Person J: Use Java; I command it. It works the same everywhere.
Person C: That doesn't make any sense. I don't believe it. There will be platform differences.
Person J: Use Java. There will be no differences. I command it.
Person C: But Java sucks....
Person J: Use Java. I command it!
Person C (to himself): Well, I can limit the company's exposure to this Java suckiness by using libraries that are wrappers for native code.
- later -
Person J: Our Java code has pernicious, mysterious bugs that only show up in deployment! Inconceivable! Oh darling customers, please don't run away so fast!
Person C: See, I told you so (under his breath:) dumbshit.
Person C (three zillion times in bars, newsgroups, and public restrooms): Java never really was write-once, run-anywhere. Gather round and hear the story of how a buggy XML parser destroyed thirty million dollars of venture capital.
Part of it is also a lot of people (myself included) got extremely sick of the "guess what I'm thinking" style of puzzle.
I think some game makers got confused between puzzles, where you get satisfaction from figuring out the solution, and jokes, where the player's confusion is a setup for the punch line.
It's usually impossible to predict the punch line to a good joke, but a joke is only funny if the game tells you the punch line instead of stonewalling you until you randomly guess it. The Leisure Suit Larry games had a way of confusing you for a little while and then "delivering" the punch line without making you work unreasonably hard for it. The Larry games also took care to get the delivery right in terms of gameplay, dialog, and animation. They milked a hell of a lot out of a handful of dirty jokes -- it seemed like everyone enjoyed the first two or three Larry games they played.
If you had checked the behavior on Windows:
C:\Documents and Settings\admin>"c:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_07\bin\appletvie
wer.exe" http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/
Warning: Can't read AppletViewer properties file: C:\Documents and Settings\admi
n\.hotjava\properties Using defaults.
Warning: tag requires name attribute.
Warning: tag requires name attribute.
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 288
at d.a(Unknown Source)
at d.a(Unknown Source)
at dust.a(Unknown Source)
at dust.init(Unknown Source)
at sun.applet.AppletPanel.run(AppletPanel.java:425)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)
How's that for write-once, run-anywhere? Not even Java can give you the same behavior on different platforms when you invoke different programs or provide different input. The web page doesn't validate and may even be miscoded (though I couldn't figure that out for sure.) The browser must clean up the page before passing data to the applet plugin.
Do you see now why I stick my neck out for Java, even to the point of downloading the entire frickin' JDK and installing it on a five-year-old Celeron laptop, just so I could reproduce the same behavior under Windows? Don't think I would have done that if I wasn't sure I would get some satisfaction from it :-)
The old-style puzzles might or might not integrate well into current styles of games, but they deserve to be treated as their own genre. The old games are terribly stale -- the humor and visuals just don't stack up for kids who have grown up on Photoshop contests and TV shows with sophisticated writing (Seinfeld, the Sopranos, etc.) Standards have been raised.
I think computer games would still be a great medium for funny writing and amusing visuals. The real problem is, who's going to do the creative work? Given how poorly the classics have aged, I doubt any aspiring game creators are excited about reviving the genre.
Java.
Write once,
run anywhere.
Yeah. Right.
The promise of Java was never, "Write once, run correctly on any broken, incomplete Java clone that you inflict on yourself out of principle."
Enjoy your martyrdom while it lasts: fully free Java is right around the corner.
The OP has a lot of things working against him
Obviously the biggest thing working against him is Slashdotters' aversion to reading.